A brain dump about living and working on the edge of the social web.

December 20, 2005

Time Off

Well it's that time of year... I usually take some time off during the holidays to spend with my family, recuperate, and work on innovation. It clears my head and gets me fired up for the coming year. Last year was about social software, shopping search, and digital lifestyle management. Some stuff is live and some is being worked on under the covers.

This year I'm focusing on the Yahoo! Shopping homepage. Trying to find its place and focus as a subdomain to yahoo.com and as a destination for shopping is intriguing. We've run lots of studies and pulled a ton of data and I think I have a decent approach. I'm also working on improving the My List and Shoposphere experience and more on shopping search. Hopefully the latter will be seen sometime soon. We did considerable work last year. It was the reason for my trip to India.

I'm most excited about the process. I really do enjoy using some of this time to think about my work unencumbered by the daily grind. No meetings or email to worry about; just pure thought. I realize that some folks don't understand this as being a relaxing way to spend vacation time, but I can't shut it off. So why not put it to good use. Ten years ago I developed the concept for the "interstitial" on my honeymoon (sorry), and once after having eye surgery for a detached retina, I got a dude fired and worked on negotiations to sell our company. At least the firing was a good thing.

Last year was productive. I started this blog for one thing. I worked on Swedelife, and developed the other concepts I mentioned. I don't think this year will be as much. But I look forward to some quiet time, after the kids are in bed, to do whatever comes to mind.

Obsessively yours...

Oh and the Xmas cards finally arrived. I tried calling Shutterfly but they weren't taking calls due to the amount of calls they were getting. That was odd. They didn't even put you on hold. Just a short message saying that you're out of luck.

Comments

Time Off

Well it's that time of year... I usually take some time off during the holidays to spend with my family, recuperate, and work on innovation. It clears my head and gets me fired up for the coming year. Last year was about social software, shopping search, and digital lifestyle management. Some stuff is live and some is being worked on under the covers.

This year I'm focusing on the Yahoo! Shopping homepage. Trying to find its place and focus as a subdomain to yahoo.com and as a destination for shopping is intriguing. We've run lots of studies and pulled a ton of data and I think I have a decent approach. I'm also working on improving the My List and Shoposphere experience and more on shopping search. Hopefully the latter will be seen sometime soon. We did considerable work last year. It was the reason for my trip to India.

I'm most excited about the process. I really do enjoy using some of this time to think about my work unencumbered by the daily grind. No meetings or email to worry about; just pure thought. I realize that some folks don't understand this as being a relaxing way to spend vacation time, but I can't shut it off. So why not put it to good use. Ten years ago I developed the concept for the "interstitial" on my honeymoon (sorry), and once after having eye surgery for a detached retina, I got a dude fired and worked on negotiations to sell our company. At least the firing was a good thing.

Last year was productive. I started this blog for one thing. I worked on Swedelife, and developed the other concepts I mentioned. I don't think this year will be as much. But I look forward to some quiet time, after the kids are in bed, to do whatever comes to mind.

Obsessively yours...

Oh and the Xmas cards finally arrived. I tried calling Shutterfly but they weren't taking calls due to the amount of calls they were getting. That was odd. They didn't even put you on hold. Just a short message saying that you're out of luck.

Obligatory Introduction

I'm David Beach and this is my blog. I'm a Product Manager, Information Architect, and founder of 12seconds.tv. I work for eBay Mobile. I'm also surviving lung cancer. This site is about my life online and some other junk... enjoy ;)